Quote:
Originally Posted by William A. Baurle
Won't at least one person defend that dreaded ratz a fratzin freakin silly little Wheelfreakinbarrow? It's a huge poem. It's an English, and/or American form of Haiku.
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XXII
from Spring and All (1923)[1]
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Bill,
I’ll give it a shot. I don’t read Williams. In fact, if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t name another poem of his except this one and Patterson, and then there’s that one about plums; beyond that I’m clueless about WCW. But I do enjoy XXII. And I’ve enjoyed this thread.
I’m distilling some of what I have read from others and from my own enjoyment explicating poems. So here goes:
First, the whole poem is based on a philosophy of existentialism, which I think modernity, that is, individual liberty, secularism, subjectivity, et cetera, thrives on; in other words, the poem essentially says, The whole world depends upon how you, the individual, sees it. What could be more appealing to someone in 1923 (before the crash)?
In this way, the poem is not unlike other modern artwork and artists such as Picasso or Joyce. Hey, who wouldn’t want to read XXII instead of Finnegan’s Wake or avoid going cross-eyed looking at Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”? The sophistication/abstraction of modernism and its guiding philosophy is boiled down into words and images that are accessible and acceptable to anyone. We should never forget how rural America was and in some ways still is for most of its history. Most of the United States did not have electricity until after WWII.
Second, I think the poem has become known as The Red Wheelbarrow because of this object’s reinforcement of my point above. “Wheelbarrow” is one word, but WCW makes it two in this poem. The enjambment puts the emphasis on the “wheel.” I don’t need to go into the historical significance of this human invention. However, the wheel and the wheelbarrow are symbolic of self-reliance, work, construction, et cetera that also reinforces my point above.
The word “barrow” is interesting for anyone living a rural existence because it is a burial mound. Think of any rural cemetery. By separating the words “wheel” and “barrow,” WCW gets to have his life in death all in two little lines of poetry:
a red wheel
barrow
Finally, the image of the rain and the white chickens, of course, are rural notions of the basic water and food of existence. They could have been anything, really, but the simplicity of “red” and “white,” “rain” and “chickens” reinforces a simplicity to modern art that we don’t get in the complicated expressions of modernism. In short, it’s appealing to just about anyone.
So there you go. I think I may have just started a first draft to my next essay. Thanks for the inspiration.
Cheers,
Greg
Adding a note: I think XXII could be Williams' "I Hear Modernity Singing."